The Moviegoer

moreover, that I predicted the January selloff and even claims that he advanced a couple of issues on my say-so. This he finds pleasing, and he always greets me with a tremendous wink as if we were in cahoots and might get caught any minute.
    He and Walter talk football. Uncle Jules’ life ambition is to revive the fortunes of the Tulane football team. I enjoy the talk because I like football myself and especially do I like to hear Uncle Jules tell about the great days of Jerry Dalrymple and Don Zimmerman and Billy Banker. When he describes a goal-line stand against L.S.U. in 1932, it is like King Arthur standing fast in the bloodred sunset against Sir Modred and the traitors. Walter was manager of the team and so he and Uncle Jules are thick as thieves.
    Uncle Jules is as pleasant a fellow as I know anywhere. Above his long Creole horseface is a crop of thick gray hair cut short as a college boy’s. His shirt encases his body in a way that pleases me. It fits him so well. My shirts always have something wrong with them; they are too tight in the collar or too loose around the waist. Uncle Jules’ collar fits his dark neck like a tape; his cuffs, folded like a napkin, just peep out past his coatsleeve; and his shirt front: the impulse comes over me at times to bury my nose in that snowy expanse of soft finespun cotton. Uncle Jules is the only man I know whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. He has made a great deal of money, he has a great many friends, he was Rex of Mardi Gras, he gives freely of himself and his money. He is an exemplary Catholic, but it is hard to know why he takes the trouble. For the world he lives in, the City of Man, is so pleasant that the City of God must hold little in store for him. I see his world plainly through his eyes and I see why he loves it and would keep it as it is: a friendly easy-going place of old-world charm and new-world business methods where kind white folks and carefree darkies have the good sense to behave pleasantly toward each other. No shadow ever crosses his face, except when someone raises the subject of last year’s Tulane-L.S.U. game.
    I mention seeing Eddie Lovell and deliver his love.
    â€œPoor Eddie,” my aunt sighs as she always does, and as always she adds: “What a sad thing that integrity, of itself, should fetch such a low price in the market place.”
    â€œHas she gone to Natchez again?” asks Uncle Jules, making his lip long and droll.
    Walter Wade cocks an ear and listens intently. He has not yet caught on to the Bollings’ elliptical way of talking. “She” is Eddie’s sister Didi, and “going to Natchez” is our way of referring to one of Didi’s escapades. Several years ago, while Didi was married to her first husband, she is said to have attended the Natchez Pilgrimage with several other couples and “swapped husbands.”
    â€œOh yes,” says my aunt grimly. “Several times.”
    â€œI didn’t think the Pilgrimage came until April,” says Walter, smiling warily.
    Kate frowns at her hands in her lap. Today Kate has her brown-eyed look. Sometimes her irises turn to discs. I remember another time when my aunt asked me to “talk” to Kate. When Kate was ten and I was fifteen, my aunt became worried about her. Kate was a good girl and made good grades, but she had no friends. Instead of playing at recess, she would do her lessons and sit quietly at her desk until class began. I made up the kind of spiel I thought my aunt had in mind. “Kate,” I said in my aunt’s Socratic manner, “you think you are the only person in the world who is shy. Believe me, you are not. Let me tell you something that happened to me,” etc. But Kate only watched me with the same brown-eyed look, irises gone to discs.
    Mercer passes the corn sticks, holding his breath at each place and letting it out with a strangling sound.
    Walter and Uncle Jules try to persuade me to ride Neptune. My aunt looks at me in disgust—with all her joking, she has a solid respect for the Carnival krewes, for their usefulness in business and social life. She shifts over into her Lorenzo posture, temple propped on three fingers.
    â€œWhat a depraved and dissolute specimen,” she says as usual. She speaks absently. It is Kate who occupies her. “Grown fat-witted from drinking of old sack.”
    â€œWhat I am, Hal, I owe to thee,” say I as usual and